All games are repetitive, be it on the macro level or micro. Pong, you hit a ball back and forth. Super Mario Bros, you run to the right and sometimes jump. Doom (and basically every shooter since) you enter an area and gun down everything that moves. The Witcher 3 might house one of gaming’s best stories, and some of its most creative side missions, but even there you’ll do an awful lot of “Following the glowing red footprints to the waiting monster.”

“Wake up, we’re here.” Words whispered by a stranger in the bowels of some dimly lit ship. It’s been more than a decade since I first played The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and I’m starting to suspect that, for me at least, there will never be another game like it, never another introduction I remember so fondly.

Off the ship into the grubby port town of Seyda Neen, with its imposing Census and Excise office, that crooked little lighthouse off to the side, a weird long-legged flea thing off in the distance. It seemed so much larger than six homes and a main road back then. Overwhelming, even. Nowadays every game’s an open-world monstrosity packed full of hundreds of activities, but in 2002? Morrowind seemed incredible. Each tiny town was a bustling metropolis.

Don’t judge a book by its cover, they, say but you know what? Having a beautiful, state-of-the-art cover sure can help.

Such is the case with Endless Space 2, the latest and prettiest 4X strategy game from Amplitude. This is the part where I say, “Endless Space 2 has quite a few issues at release” though—and it does. It’s not a flawless game, nor does it feel as fresh as Amplitude’s fantasy spin-off Endless Legend.

I love it anyway.

A chaotic universe

It’s just so damn slick. Almost too slick, with Amplitude apparently concerned more with artistry than creating an intuitive user interface at times. There were many moments in Endless Space 2 where I sat staring at some random menu, trying to figure out how to do the thing I wanted to do and not quite understanding which button would allow me to do it.

There’s a story I like to tell about Prey. It was back in February, at a preview event—my first ever hands-on demo with the game. Twenty or thirty of us were packed into this room to play the opening hour, which is filled with all sorts of tantalizing areas just out of reach: Locked doors you can’t yet hack open, a room blocked by some crates too heavy to lift.

And a broken-down elevator, the words “REPAIR II NEEDED” appearing in red as you approach. “A whole second floor to return to later,” I thought, made a note of it, and wandered off.

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GamingGamesEverything review: Live a thousand lives in this ambitious recreation of the universeWed, 03 May 2017 12:00:00 -0700Hayden DingmanHayden Dingman

I have lived a thousand lives.

I’ve been a single-cell speck in the primordial ooze that gave way to life. I’ve been a clump of grass, clinging to my makeshift desert oasis. I’ve been a wolf, tumbling through the icy wastes. I’ve been a pair of scissors, discarded on a city street. I’ve been a skyscraper, towering over the same street. I’ve been a continent, scarcely aware of the skyscrapers built upon it. I’ve been a planet, a solar system, a galaxy, multiple galaxies—as unknowable to the skyscraper as the skyscraper is to the grain of pollen. I’ve been a turd, covered in flies.

I’ve been, in a word, everything.

All god’s creatures

Everything is about perspective, its goal nothing less than simulating the entire universe. Each and every object, from a single electron to clusters of galaxies, is hypothetically represented here.

Familiarity breeds contempt, and there’s no genre more vulnerable to contempt than horror. Even the most creative scare becomes banal given enough repetition, with the magic replaced by mundanity as soon as we understand the trick to it.

Outlast 2 is proof of this fragility, of the delicate knife-edge developers walk between terror and tedium, mysterious and melodramatic. And the worst part is that, given the root cause, Outlast 2’s problems only become apparent late in the game when players have exhausted the bag of tricks and seen them again and again and again. It’s terrifying, until it’s not. Then it’s just disappointing.

Opiate of the masses

Horror is subjective of course—more than most genres. Not all of my complaints will apply to everyone, and if you’ve made it through Outlast 2 and love it then more power to you. Fear is a tricky emotion to gauge.

It starts like a nightmare. You’re hundreds of feet below the Earth’s surface, plumbing the depths of a seemingly endless cave, and it goes pitch black. Darkness all around, so dark you can’t see the ground beneath your feet, the water dripping around you, or the backs of your own hands.

Scanner Sombre

And then, a beam of light. Or rather hundreds of beams, all shooting out of a handheld LIDAR scanner. The world around you turns red and orange and green and blue, mapping your surroundings with thousands of tiny points of light. It’s as beautiful as it is cold and digital, a haunting Seurat landscape.

Now, the reality of the situation is a bit more complicated. I've gotten plenty of use out of both my Oculus Rift and HTC Vive over the past year, experimenting with dozens if not hundreds of games and experiences. Job Simulator and Fantastic Contraption impressed early on, Call of the Starseed took spectacle to a new level, and Arizona Sunshine was both lengthy enough and polished enough to feel like a "full game." To say nothing of Google Earth VR, Tilt Brush, Oculus Medium, and other non-gaming applications.

Another year, another LucasArts classic spruced up and spit-polished for the benefit of fans new and old. With Grim Fandango and Day of the Tentacle out of the way, this year Double Fine turns to 1995’s oft-overlooked motorcycle adventure Full Throttle.

Those who’ve played the previous remasters should know what to expect by now. It’s Full Throttle, warts-and-all, but with reworked graphics and an optional developer commentary for the diehards. The problem? Full Throttle has a lot of warts.

I feel very conflicted about Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition, a.k.a. Bulletstorm: Remastered. Not so much about the game itself—People Can Fly’s shooter is unabashedly dumb, but in a fun “We did this on purpose” way that mostly works. And the Skill Shot system (more on that later) is still great.

But before we delve into the game itself, it’s worth talking up front about the existence of this remaster. I don’t know what bizarre series of backroom decisions led to Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition, nor why the publishing rights transferred from EA to Gearbox, nor why Gearbox was interested in the first place.

To call Yooka-Laylee a Banjo-Kazooie “clone” is to do it a disservice. In everything but name, this is a full-fledged Banjo-Kazooie sequel—closer, in fact, to its Nintendo 64 predecessors than actual 2008 sequel Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts.

And that’s exactly what Playtonic’s Kickstarter promised, so good on them.

Treasure Trove Cove: Redux

You play as Yooka and Laylee, a chameleon and bat respectively. The pair are lounging around their home in Shipwreck Creek one day when evil Capital B (a play on both his bumblebee-like nature and his status as “Boss”) decides to vacuum up all the books in the world and, I guess, turn them into gold or something.

Investigate the crash site. The marker’s sitting on my map, far to the northeast of a planet called “Elaaden,” across sand dunes and past ancient ruins. It sounds important, maybe—the type of small-scale situation that, in any other game, might be the first loose thread of a tangled, thrilling adventure.

And so finally I obliged—me, the Pathfinder, one of the highest-ranking people in the Andromeda galaxy. I took time from my war against a race of genocidal aliens to investigate the crash site.

There were three survivors amidst wreckage I could swear I’d seen duplicated on another planet earlier. Three of them—but within seconds another ship lands, this one full of hostiles. I kill them. The people I saved thank me, briefly.

"We want Thimbleweed Park to be like an undiscovered classic LucasArts' adventure game you'd never played before. A game discovered in a dusty old desk that puts a smile on your face and sends a wave of nostalgia through you in the same way it does for us."

I lifted that paragraph from Thimbleweed Park's original Kickstarter campaign, a statement of intent dating back to late 2014. It's a captivating idea—a long-lost masterpiece, a video game B-side tucked away and forgotten, perfectly preserved in 1s and 0s on some floppy disk.

It's also exactly what Ron Gilbert, Gary Winnick, and co. delivered.

Retro-futurism

Thimbleweed Park is a LucasArts adventure game, through and through. Sure, the engine is quite a bit more powerful than SCUMM, the dialogue more self-referential, and there are a few modern conveniences baked in. But with minimal tweaking you could've handed this game to me in the early '90s and I wouldn't have blinked.

Well, the hallowed day has finally arrived. Assuming you’re willing to spend $600 on an Oculus Rift and its accompanying Touch controllers, then another $70-ish on a plastic guitar and a copy of the game, then you can finally—finally—play Rock Band on a PC.

It’s really more like a Guitar Hero game of course, and lacking the huge DLC back catalog of its console counterparts, but still. Rock Band. On PC.

Sort of.

All the world’s a stage

I’ve been messing with Rock Band VR off-and-on for the last two days. The first thing I’ll say: Much as I hate the idea of rebuying my entire song library piecemeal, this game desperately needs DLC. It’s been a while since I’ve been limited to only the pack-in soundtrack on a Rock Band game, and oof, it’s rough.

Night in the Woods takes so long to get its meandering plot moving, I almost thought it never would, and that I’d be listening to the trials and tribulations of small-town Anywheresville for seven hours. I’d even started to grow okay with that idea—and then the plot did start moving, and I sorta wished it hadn’t. Funny how things work sometimes.

It’s neither praise nor condemnation, simply a comment on how Night in the Woods defies expectations as an oft-brilliant piece of interactive fiction couched within just enough action and leaping to-and-fro to get the “This isn’t even a game!” crowd off its back. Maybe.

Night in the Woods

Taking place in the quiet mining town of Possum Springs, Night in the Woods tells the story of Mae Borowski, a 20-something college girl who bails out of college and returns home to live with her parents, hang out with old friends, “Get The Band Back Together,” eat pizza, go to keggers, and try to figure out what the hell she should do next.

Ghost Recon: Wildlands is a technological marvel. I said it Monday in PCWorld's initial PC performance impressions piece, and it’s worth reiterating now. This is a game where you can spend 10 to 15 minutes crossing the map by helicopter without hitting a single load screen. In a car? I don’t even want to estimate how long it’d take to cross this fictional Bolivia. A maddening amount of time, no doubt.

It's stunning—and yet therein lies the seeds of Ghost Recon’s downfall. So much space, and absolutely no reason for most of it to exist.

Far as I can tell, Ghost Recon: Wildlands is a 30-50 hour game. PCWorld received a review code late on Friday (during GDC, no less) and I’ve only managed to play maybe 10 hours. So yeah, as you might expect we’re not reviewing Wildlands today.

Even so, I’m here to offer up my impressions from those first ten hours—mostly PC performance, but also an abbreviated section about the game itself.

Performance

If nothing else, Wildlands is a technical feat. I’m not going to say this is the largest map I’ve seen in a modern game, but it certainly feels that way at times. It’s enormous, with the game often asking you to travel upwards of six kilometers from one end of a province to another—and there are 20-odd provinces in the game, with no load screens as you travel.

After two weeks circling opponents, sword held stiffly above my head, waiting for an opening, I think it’s time to slap an official score on For Honor. It’s not the score I wanted to give, and it’s not even a score I’m confident will apply long-term—Ubisoft has leaned heavily on games-as-a-service the past few years, with numerous instances of a stuttering launch experience turning around to an unabashed success. Looking at you, Rainbow Six Siege.

Maybe For Honor will find itself added to that list someday. It has the potential—there’s an excellent core concept here. But oh, there’s also so much reason to be disappointed. Worst of all? There’s no reason for it. Reverse a few key choices and this all could have been averted.

I briefly wrote about Halo Wars 2 last week—mostly performance and issues I had with the PC controls at launch. Rather than rehashing those quibbles, head over here for PCWorld’s look at the technical side of Halo Wars 2.

This will be our official review of the actual game, focused primarily on the campaign and the “should-be-good-except” Blitz Mode, both of which I put more time over the past week. The short version? Halo Wars 2 isn’t bad, but it’s definitely not the real-time strategy genre’s long-sought salvation.

Sniper Elite 4 is a very serious game about stealthily killing Nazi scum during the Allied invasion of Italy. Most of the time.

It's also a laugh riot of a game where each and every bullet is shown in glorious slow-motion, tearing through skin and internal organs, kidneys and livers and testicles and other fleshy bits all jiggling in a weirdly detailed nod to Newton’s laws.

Which Sniper Elite 4 you choose to focus on? Well, that’s up to you.

Shot through the heart, you’re to blame

As I wrote in our preview last month: “While the series may never wholly shed its grindhouse B-movie feel, there’s an increasingly smart stealth game hidden underneath the fountains of blood and guts.”

2016 was one hell of a year for Myst-alikes, eh? Straight from the source, from Cyan itself, you had official spiritual successor Obduction—a game which crept onto our Games of the Year list. Then there was The Eyes of Ara, which utilized the same sort of puzzles although in quite a different sort of setting.

The Nvidia Shield TV, a $200 Android-based streaming box with excessive processing power, appeals to a scattershot of audiences. It’s the ideal streamer for PC gamers who also want to play those games in their living room, for media hoarders who want to build a cheap a Plex server, for cord-cutters in search of over-the-air DVR solutions, for Kodi enthusiasts with that media center's morally dubious plug-ins, for 4K HDR TV owners who have an aversion to Roku, or for people who just want as much computing power as they can get.

I’m starting to think that the more high-profile the source material, the worse the Telltale adaptation. It’s not a hard and fast rule, I guess. The Walking Dead gets a pass because it was the first of the modern-era Telltale games, and people love Tales From the Borderlands.

But Game of Thrones was the first Telltale game to really underwhelm, and with Batman’s fifth and final episode now released I think it’s safe to say it’s also somewhat disappointing—and for similar reasons.

The problem seems to be Telltale trying to construct a Telltale-style story within the bounds of a very strict universe. The studio’s best games, be it Borderlands or Wolf Among Us or even The Walking Dead, have taken place in well-established worlds but ones where there’s plenty of freedom for characters to act.

There’s an old game review cliché. Maybe you’ve heard it: “Fans of the series will love [INSERT GAME].” It’s overused shorthand for saying there are issues with a game, but the diehard fans, the true believers, will probably overlook those problems and enjoy themselves regardless.

Dead Rising 4 is the exact opposite. Fans of Dead Rising are most likely going to loathe this game, and what Capcom’s done with the series. Everyone else? Well, let’s talk.

Frank West is comin’ to town

We don’t often hear about video games “selling out” like musicians—and I mean that in the “Giving up their principles for a paycheck” way, not physically selling out of copies. For the most part, the games industry doesn’t really work that way. Big-budget games are conceived of as big-budget games from the start, while most indie developers are content to stay independent (or at least mostly independent).

Bear with me for a bit. I’m going to get around to Watch Dogs 2, but it’s going to be by way of a semi-lengthy tangent into Assassin’s Creed—particularly, what Assassin’s Creed II meant to that now-juggernaut of a series.

It’s easy to forget, with almost a decade of sequels under our belt, that there was a time when Assassin’s Creed could’ve conceivably died off. Early on, too. After garnering quite a bit of hype, the original Assassin’s Creed released in 2007 to middling reviews. “Disappointing,” said many, or “Repetitive.” It had some great ideas, but was a boring mess of a game.

That might have been the end, but no. Assassin’s Creed II released in 2009, ushering in the “Ubisoft Formula” that propelled the publisher to new heights and then became the butt of industry jokes: 1) Climb towers 2) Unlock a million icons on the map 3) Grind out some missions 4) Repeat. Sure, it’s trite now, but at the time it marked a huge shift in the open-world genre.

That said, it's lightly less busted after installing the new 1.2 patch that released on Tuesday. But things still aren’t great by any means. I’m still seeing wild frame rate swings, from 100+ down to 50 on Ultra settings with a GeForce GTX 980 Ti at 1080p, depending on where I am and what I’m looking at. Worse is that the settings still seem like window dressing. Frame rates stay almost exactly the same regardless of whether I’m on Ultra or Very Low, and the game relies on console-style upscaling as a crutch.

There’s an easy way to judge “Builder”-style games, I think—maybe not the most scientific way, but certainly a gut-level instinct: Was there a moment while playing where I looked up to find that it was 4 in the morning and I should probably have gone to sleep hours ago?

And if we’re judging Planet Coaster on that criteria, then it’s a stunning success.

Six Flags wasn’t built in a day

Technically there were two different theme park builders released last week—Planet Coaster, our main concern for this review, being one. The other was RollerCoaster Tycoon World ($35 on Steam), which I don’t think is quite as bad as the reputation it’s racked up on Steam but does seem to have been rushed out the door in some weird attempt to “beat” Planet Coaster to the punch.

Perhaps it’s time to acknowledge that this whole near-future and not-so-near-future experiment has been something of a misstep for Call of Duty.

Last year’s Black Ops III was a decent enough shooter, reworking the existential angst of the Cold War for an era of AI soldiers and virtual battlefields. But it’s the exception, the lone slightly-brighter spot in an increasingly tedious trajectory arcing through Ghosts, Advanced Warfare, and now Infinite Warfare.

We used to talk about “Call of Duty killers.” Little did we know Call of Duty would kill itself.

To infinity and beyond

It starts out well enough. Like many people, I actually watched Infinite Warfare’s E3 trailer with some amount of intrigue. “What is this game? It looks gorgeous,” I wondered, ships zipping around through the inky vacuum of space. And the campaign opens with some of that magic as your team plummets through Europa’s thin atmosphere to the icy surface.

Imagine a world in peril. Kyros, the overlord, dominates everything in the known world—except for one tiny realm, that is. Known as the Tiers, this last bastion of goodness, of freedom, holds out in the face of impossible odds. Armies clash, and Kyros’s overwhelming forces handily dispatching the desperate populace until all hope seems lost.

In a normal video game, this would be the point where your untrained, unskilled, and unknown Joe Nobody enters the picture to save the day, to beat back the tides of darkness, confront Kyros, and eventually defeat him.

Not in Tyranny, though.

Sympathy for the devil

In Tyranny, the latest isometric CRPG from Obsidian (following Pillars of Eternity), you work for Kyros. You are the bad guy, or at least one of his many servants. You play as a Fatebinder, an enforcer of the empire’s (often heinous) laws. Obsidian likened the Fatebinders to Judge Dredd the first time they showed us the game, and I’m going to stick with that. It’s an apt description—police force for a brutal and absolutist regime.

Rusty Lake Hotel is one of those rare games I played completely at random. Earlier this year I was browsing Steam’s new releases, loved the art (weirdly reminiscent of a cartoon American Gothic), grabbed it, forgot about it for a few months, and then booted it up one night on a whim. And what I got was one of the best adventure games of 2016.

The mundane nature of Rusty Lake Hotel’s puzzles sat in stark contrast to its grim undertones, a darkly humorous story about guests being killed off at a Victorian Era hotel. Oh, except you’re the murderer, the guests are all animals, and every time you kill one off (always in bizarre fashion) the other guests eat the corpse.